Trading Product
Counterparty / Contract Capture
This subsystem allows entity information to be captured for wholesale trading counterparties, exchange brokers, clearing broker and non-trading business entities. Multiple addresses, contacts and contracts may be entered for each entity. All information necessary for wholesale trading activities, such as duns numbers and tax ID’s, is captured. Multiple addresses and contacts may be associated with each agreement. Agreements are effective dated and can be placed into parent/child relationships with other agreements meaning that trade entries associated with agreements never need be altered if agreement are discontinued or consolidated into other agreements or counterparties. The parent/child structure of the agreement can be changed to reflect new structures without having to alter existing trade entries.
Special features include
- The ability to enter an unlimited number of locations, contacts, and agreements associated with each entity.
- The ability to easily transfer/consolidate agreements to alternate counterparties or brokers should one entity acquire another.
- The ability to capture fee’s associated with brokers and counterparties.
- The ability to capture credit terms associated with counterparties.
- The ability to automatically generate confirmations.
Trade Capture
This subsystem allows for both automated and manual trade entry and is capable of handling multiple commodities such as gas, oil, and power futures as well as multiple trade types such as swaps, plain vanilla, shaped energy and some exotic options such as FTR’s, CRR’s, and heat rate options. Trade entry screens are customizable and can be tailored to the specific type of deal being entered.
Special features include
- Automated upload of deals from FIX protocol interfaces.
- Automated upload of deals from Excel and CSV files.
- The ability to classify deals by book, strategy, and trader.
- User customizable trade entry screens.
- Smart auto fill screens designed to reduce entry requirements and minimize input errors.
- Three tier deal/price/flow architecture that reduces deal entry requirements.
Bid and Award Capture
This subsystem interfaces with both ERCOT and PJM using API interfaces to submit bids and extract awards. Bids can be uploaded directly into the subsystem from Excel spread sheets, or entered manually. Once in the system, bids are submitted to ERCOT or PJM. Awarded bids are then extracted into this subsystem where they are used to generate trade entries which then flow into the valuation, pricing, and accounting subsystems.
Special features include
- The ability to develop bidding strategies outside of the system and upload the resulting bids through Excel.
- One click submission of bids.
- One click extraction of awards.
- One click verification that all bids were received by ERCOT or PJM.
Pricing Capture
This subsystem automatically captures settlement prices directly from ERCOT, PJM, CAISO and MISO. Additional prices can be uploaded from a variety of sources that include Excel, Access, MYSQL or manual entry. Prices are stored in a unique fashion designed to minimize erroneous entries and reduce trade entry requirements.
Special features include
- Automatic upload of most public settlement prices.
- Automatic upload of forward settle prices from ICE using customer accounts.
- Daily reporting designed to detect missing prices.
- The ability to store massive volume of settlement pricing.
Broker Fee Capture
This subsystem tracks fees to exchanges, electronic trading platforms, ISO’s, and OTC brokers on a deal by deal basis. These fees can be manually entered or calculated automatically by the system for trades that use predefined fee structures.
Special features include
- Automatic generation of broker fee remittances.
Trade Confirmation
This subsystem interfaces with the trade entry and counterparty subsystems to determine which trades need to be confirmed. Once that determination is made, the confirmation entry is created automatically and either sent to the external counterparty or tagged as needing external confirmation. If the external counterparty fails to do the confirmation in the specified time period, the confirmation can then be sent to the external counterparty.
Special features include
- The ability to dynamically change confirmation verbiage by deal type.
- The ability to specify confirmation rules by counterparty.
Physical Power Scheduling
This subsystem interfaces directly with ERCOT for physical energy scheduling of all bilateral transactions. The ERCOT Nodal API is used to schedule physical trades, in addition to providing verification that all information is identical between the two systems. This subsystem interfaces with the trade entry system to automatically create schedule transactions. These transactions can be verified and adjusted if appropriate prior to submission.
Special features include
- One click submission of all schedules.
- One click verification that all trades were scheduled.
- One click verification that all trades were matched.
Valuation and Settlement Calculation
This subsystem generates daily forward and settlement valuations. Forward trades are automatically valued as they enter the system and both forward and settlement valuations of all relevant trades occur nightly. Trades are expanded into the smallest appropriate interval, valued, and stored on a separate database for reporting purposes. Basically a month long deal can be entered into the system as a one line entry and if the settlement interval is a 15 minute settle, 2976 transactions would be created if the deal flowed 7X24 during a month that contained 31 days. The settlement information then flows into the accounting system to produce invoices and remittances associated with the settled trades.
Special features include
- Permanent retention of all settlement information.
- Permanent retention of all month end forward information.
- Summarization tables designed to reduce run cycles on daily reporting.
- Data flows into accounting subsystem automatically generating prior period adjustments if the characteristics of the trades change after month end close.
- Daily position reports generation including Greeks.
- P&L report generation.
- Credit exposure reports generation by counterparty.
Billing
This subsystem interfaces directly with the settlement and accounting subsystems to generate invoices for trades and collateral postings. Invoice netting can be controlled by counterparty.
Special features include
- Automatic generation of Interest invoices.
- Invoice netting is an option.
Accounts Payable / Receivable
This subsystem allows manual entry of payable and receivable transactions which can then be itemized against invoices to quickly determine under or over payments. The interface is simple and easy to use. Cash entries can be easily extracted for external system interfaces.
Special features include
- Easy to use Quick Books type interface.
- Easy extraction of information for external system interfaces.
Credit Analysis
This subsystem interfaces with the counterparty, valuation, settlement, and accounting subsystems to determine contractual credit requirements, unpaid invoice amounts, current forward valuation at risk, and collateral posting amounts. This information is then used to produce reports showing excess or shortfalls in collateral postings by counterparty.
Special features include
- Intraday collateral posting reports.
Daily Reporting
This subsystem allows users to run predefined reports on an as needed basis or to have those reports run automatically by the system and emailed to selected users. Large repositories such as valuation and settlement are stored in a reporting database to minimize the impact of intraday reports. New reports can be easily added to the system based upon a client’s needs.
Special features include
- A separate reporting database for large repositories.
- New reports can be easily added to the reporting subsystem.
Auditing
This subsystem provides a method of reviewing all changes made to master transactions. The system is designed to retain a history of each modification made. The retention of the change history is dynamic and can be controlled on an individual table by table basis.
Special features include
- The ability to dynamically change the alteration history retention by table.
Ledger Entry
The subsystem extracts all relevant retail transactions and summarizes them into ledger entries during an accounting close process. Once closed, a period can be locked thus preventing accidental alterations to transactions associated with that period. The summarized ledger entries can then be extracted and entered into alternate accounting systems such as Quick Books if desired. The accounting subsystem is also designed to accept manual entries and can therefore be used as a replacement for external accounting subsystems.
Special features include
- The ability to alter ledger number schemes without changing existing transactions.
- The ability to maintain detail ledger entries that can be extracted and summarized for entry into external accounting systems.
Custom Security
This subsystem provides multiple levels of security within the entire application. The first level of security is by table. The security subsystem can restrict access by table or groups of tables. The second level of security is controlled at a company level. Each user defined to the system can be associated with multiple companies. The system can be used to allow anything from full access to no access for a company within authorized tables. The third level of access is by application screen. Users can be allowed or prevented from viewing content on a screen by screen basis.
Special features include
- The ability to control access by table, company, and screen.
- The ability to force password changes on a user by user basis.
- The ability to encrypt passwords within the application thus preventing users from accessing data from third party software.
Task Scheduler
This subsystem is used to automate daily processing. Nearly all functions within the application can be entered into the task scheduler and run on an automated timer throughout the day.
Special features include
- The ability to create multiple schedules.
- The ability to specify single or multiple starts within a schedule.
- The ability to hold a process until a specified time.
- Message logging indicating the status of each schedule process.